FlowTown adds social media profiles to businesses’ email lists

Flowtown, a company that connects data from social media sites with a company’s email list, announced Wednesday that it raised a seed round of funding for $750,000. The funds will be used to hire more people, especially developers familiar with Ruby, a coding framework for Web development.

The company targets small businesses looking to do more with their email lists. Once launched, customers upload their email lists, either manually or by importing them from mail services like Google’s Gmail. The service matches social profiles on sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to the email addresses. The list also shows the person’s location and ranking on Klout, a tool that determines a person’s influence among users of the Twitter microblogging service.

Once the social data is available, the customer can create marketing campaigns. Similar to sending a basic email, the campaign includes a subject title and body of text. The only difference is that the customer chooses a social channel on which to send the message, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr and StumbleUpon. For example, a customer could create a specific message, such as “I found you on Twitter,” to go to the people who have Twitter profiles within their email list.

The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2009, claims to be working with more than 15,000 businesses. Investors include Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Software; Mark Goines, a former Mint.com board member; Dave McClure of 500 Startups; Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures; Saar Gur at Charles River Ventures; and Travis Kalanick, Auren Hoffman, Brian Norgard, and Dan Gould.